Artist bio
Merry Sun is a sound artist and sculptor based in Kansas City, Missouri. She was born in Shenyang, Liaoning, China, in 1996 and immigrated to the States at the age of three. In her practice, Sun constructs compositional infrastructures that utilize live-processed sound to facilitate audience movement and migration. Her installations combine Eastern and Western standards to reconcile her feelings of displacement that accompany the immigrant identity. Wielding the porosity of sound, Sun dissolves the boundaries between space and place within her sculptural systems. In 2019, Sun received her BFA in Visual Art and Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, Missouri). In 2023, she received her MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University (New York, New York). Sun is a 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow and an instructor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, where she is also the director of Off-Site Art Space, a student exhibition space. In 2026, Sun founded Trout & Brown, an art and design gallery in Kansas City, Missouri, with her partner, M. H. Kirkwood.
Artist Statement
In my practice, I construct compositional infrastructures to address the sense of unbelonging that accompanies the immigrant identity. Through built systems, both physical and semantic, I transform space into site into place. Using sculptural constructs, I bring specificity to a space and define a temporary site for sound-facilitated interactions, which are informed by the ghosts of my personal and ancestral past. Sound acts as the entryway for human subjectivities to enter and occupy the site so that each individual may place-make among the work. My recent research has expanded into larger infrastructural systems that integrate sculpture with technology to encourage audience movement and exploration, spatializing sound while retracing my personal history as an immigrant.
The sound in my compositions is sculpturally dependent, forming juxtapositions between the physicality of materials and the immateriality of sound. I engage with the material language of construction and infrastructure to reinforce the ideology of labor that drives my work. I use sound to facilitate audience engagement situated in personal intuition and exploration rather than in directed movement, allowing my work a level of autonomy that lies external to myself. Having grown up in the crevice between two countries, I’ve traveled east to go west, and stood west and gone east, only to be identified as a foreign body once more. I retrace this circumambulation through the audience activation of my sounding sculptural installations.
For inquiries, email mrrps(at)merrysun.art